… clap your hands. Except, how do you know when you’re happy? And can you be happy without knowing it? I suppose I was happy without knowing it for years. When I used to work a desk job (sitting at a cubicle all day), I felt like my life had no meaning or purpose. And it’s likely that the job I had was not in line with who I wanted to be at the time.

Middle School is when everything your parents say makes no sense to you, when your friends become enemies and enemies become friends at the drop of a hat, and you have to start thinking, at least a little bit, about growing from a child to an adult. You also have to remember a locker code, or at least I did when I was a teenager. I was lucky enough to spend some of these formative years in Cairo, Egypt.

+++ title = “03” date = 2019 +++ When my son was a newborn, he would occasionally get fussy. I learned a trick from a book called Wonder Weeks that never fails to calm him down. I hold him so he’s parallel to the ground, tummy down. I put him in front of me and fly him through the air like an airplane. We go around the entire house and I pretend to be the “captain” and occasionally make “announcements” about what he’s seeing from his “window.

I have four Alexa echos in my house. We use the echos to turn lights on when we’re holding babies, to arm our alarm system when we’re walking out the door, to keep timers while we’re working, and most recently we’ve set up our son’s room to turn off lights and turn on white noise/humidifier machines simultaneously with one command. I’ve also used Alexa to turn off my downstairs space heater after 30 minutes of use.